Living a digital life with empty pockets

New series! Today I decided to newb myself up and start a small travelogue of the newbie places on the Second Life grid. I’ve never visited most of these places, and I wanted to see what they were like, what kind of surroundings the average newbie would find themselves in when they leave Help Island and take their very first teleport to a Mainland Infohub.

The first Infohub you land at after leaving Help Island (assuming this is how you reach the Mainland; some people have friends already in SL who will send them a teleport offer to wherever they are) will automatically be set as your Home location (you can always change it later). This means, if you open up your Map and click the ‘Home’ button, or you use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+H, that’s where you’ll land. So when you click that “Ready to start your Second Life?” big sign on Help Island, click it a lot of times, until you have a choice of locations!

Perhaps with these little travelogues, I can give newbies an idea of which locations they think they might like the best. I’ll begin with the Infohubs that are found in the Help Island signs, then I’ll move on to the resident-run orientation places, and other newbie places such as NCI and The Shelter.

In order to improve security for our customers, we’ve begun making a series of changes to the way security and account logins are handled at Xstreet SL. Since much of our service is money-related, it’s imperative that we tighten things up to keep your funds and your accounts safe.

The first of these changes went live yesterday. Previously, cookies stored in your web browser were used to keep account logins persistent for up to a month at a time. Now you will be required to login whenever a new “session” is started. Furthermore, if you use multiple browsers or multiple computers and log out of your account on one computer, all of the others will be logged out as well.

Over the next few days and weeks we’ll be making your accounts more secure, but this generally won’t involve noticeable functionality changes. Once we’ve reached a certain point we’ll review options for making security less intrusive by requiring logins less often.

About

About SL for Nowt

So what is SL for Nowt all about? (Hey, that rhymed…)

Initially, I wanted to see if it was possible to create an entirely new avatar in the Second Life world, without putting in any money of my own. I planned to do this by picking money from money trees only. No camping (sitting on chairs/mopping floors/doing other activities that make an area look busy, in return for small amounts of cash), and definitely no begging! I set myself the goal of a minimum 50L$ per day from the money trees, and met this target on most days. I even exceeded it a lot on a few days. Along the way, I spotted (and screencaptured) many odd things, met some interesting people, got annoyed at the rudeness of ’some people’ and generally had a fun time.

The blog has now taken a different path, since my original goals have now been met. Now, SL for Nowt is all about finding freebies and cheapies, living a virtual existence in the Second Life world on the cheap, and helping out newbies as much as possible.

SL for Nowt has moved away from WordPress hosting, as I was unhappy with WordPress inserting ads into my content that I had no control over. It’s now self-hosted, so please hop over and pay a visit to the new blog!

Disclaimer

SL for Nowt is an entirely unofficial blogsite, and is not endorsed by Linden Research, Inc.